You can find lots on this in the mail archives but to state it again,
unless you *_know_* how to make use of a screen reader even hpr in every
day use, you can be terribly misslead by your results. I recommend no
screen reader for development or all but final checking but instead
encourage good practice.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phillip Pi" <philpi@apu.edu>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 2:42 PM
Subject: RE: Screen readers
Harry, I was looking for screen readers that could read Web pages
online.
I am just curious how these things work and sound like :). JAWS seems a
good program to try. Thank you for the URL and information.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Harry Woodrow wrote:
> Home page Reader is nice and rather effective but it comes at a cost.
Many
> (Most?) blind people who use the web seem to use screen readers which
can
> read the text off the screen but with some constraints. A very basic
reader
> which makes you cut and paste your text into it is Read Please from
> http://readplease.com/ which is free for the basic version. This will
give
> some idea of how text will sound.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Kynn Bartlett
> Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 3:21 AM
> To: Phillip Pi
> Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: ASCII Ribbon Campaign
>
>
> At 11:12 AM 10/30/2001 , Phillip Pi wrote:
> >Kynn, is there a freeware version or even an open source version? I
don't
> >want to use it if it is limited (e.g. short amount of time). Thanks.
>
> Nope. Most screenreaders cost big $$$ -- Jaws, for example is
> something like $700 or $800, or $1200 or so if you're using Windows
> NT/2000. You can find things like IBM's Home Page Reader for a more
> affordable $150 -- and I recommend it to EVERY professional web
> developer -- but I don't know if it will read your email messages
> for you. (It might!)
>
> You can try TV Raman's EmacSpeak, which is an Emacs-based application
> (and which is free and might even be open source) to read web pages
> out loud and maybe even other stuff. It's also notable for having
> aural CSS support, but I haven't gotten it running myself so I can't
> vouch for it.
>
> Many operating systems have the ability to speak things, if you figure
> out how to make it work -- e.g. recent versions of Windows, or MacOS
> for a long time now. Actually getting content of an email message
> read out loud may be tricky, though, as these "mini-screenreaders"
> are quite limited in functionality.